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On Happily Disrupting The User Experience

Recently, I was visiting with a public company's Webmaster
discussing a simple idea: the selective use of interstitials (pop-up ad windows). This
particular Web site gets a fair amount of traffic. And because the
company was planning a new product launch, I thought an
interstitial would be a relatively low-cost way of starting to build
buzz. From experience, I knew that whenever a public company
was about to announce its quarterly earnings (as this one was),
there was a predictable increase in traffic, probably attributable to
individual investors and perhaps even institutional investors. So
the proposed interstitial would be getting attention from other
important corporate audiences.

Blood boiled to the Webmaster's scalp. Timing being everything, it
appeared that I had unwittingly joined a game of "Catch The
Chainsaw" just as it was my turn. Oh, lucky me.

"I'm familiar with interstitials. But they disrupt the user experience,
so we don't do them," he said with more than a dollop of disdain.

The corporate marketers in the room, perhaps awed by the words
"user experience," were eerily silent on this point. I mean, no one
in their right mind would ever consider disrupting the user
experience.

I am not in my right mind.

And I am a raving pragmatist on the topic of user experience.

My television user experience is disrupted (or, at the very least,
divided) by commercial messages. My newspaper user experience
is disrupted (or, at the very least, shaped) by advertising. My
magazine user experience is disrupted by blow-in cards. And yet, if
the quality of the editorial or program content is valuable to me, I
really don't care much about the disruptions. I feel that this is a
necessary evil, a bargain that I am willing to strike because I want
my Lewis Lapham, "West Wing," "Gideon's Crossing," Sunday
New York Times, Simpsons, Jim Lehrer, Bob Metcalfe--and I
want them all to prosper.

(Though Richard Sennett's wonderful work, The Fall of Public
Man, is not exactly on point here, I suggest it just the same. I liken
what some Web user experience ideologues are pitching to the
homogenous, sanitized, gated, guarded, master-planned
communities that continue to spring up along the margins of all
that we may fear: the culturally, racially, architecturally and
economically unzoned, the noisy, the morally equivocal, the
sometimes-dangerous, the crowded, the unscripted. When you
drive through the gates of one of these enclaves and pass along its
avenues, ("Misty Glen," "Windheather," and "Faun Falls"), you
can read the superego's ham-handed script. Here is "happily ever
after," the place where all stories end. Here we accept the details of
life only grudgingly. We will fight every wrinkle. We will keep
death outside the gates. And, as your car pulls up on one of the
home's driveways, you get that good and bad feeling: the feeling
that only intruders understand. For the specific germ that the
master planner would scrub away is here, idling in your blood-
soaked heart.)

Now, there is much to be said for a positive, seamless user
experience. (I know because I've said some of it.) And, admittedly,
the lion's share of arguments and ideas from the positive-user-
experience camp have nothing to do with advertising.

(I think a lot of life is a strange dialogue between resistance and
release. Translation: Maher has internalized just enough of the
Puritan ethic to be suspicious of things made too easy. I like the
occasional glitch. The cardinal virtue of commerce, i.e.,
convenience, sometimes makes me a bit suspicious. I like a garage
sale that has a box, usually underneath a cheap card table, full of
small, interesting stuff that the seller couldn't find a convenient
category for. In college, you would find me on the fifth floor of our
library because it had whole rows labeled "Miscellaneous." And
my Mom used to tell these marvelous, mundane stories that
included cousins and recipes and former employers and how Gable
used to date a Houston society girl and the timid, crazy uncle who
was mustard-gassed in World War I, then came back to the States
convinced he was French. All my Mom's stories needed to
complete their effect was a "Yup, that sure was a shaggy dog" at
the end. And all of what I've just described--even the way I've
described it--might be characterized as a bad user experience.)

The occasional (as in very seldom) interstitial is, in my opinion,
not a bad thing. And, from a marketer's standpoint, it can be a
powerful, cost-effective way to get the word out about new product
offerings or upcoming events.

The interstitial is an obvious bit of advertising. And I've come to
really like obvious advertising because it is what it is and it
pretends to be nothing else. On the other hand, when a respected
financial or industry analyst seamlessly weaves a reference to one
of their house favorites into an article or a conference speech, it's
hard to tell where the self interest leaves off and the good counsel
begins. (There is no necessary conflict between self-interest and
good counsel, but often there is.)

As for the proper execution of an interstitial, all I can recommend
is that you keep the interruption short and, preferably, clever. Give
the site visitors the option to "Enter," rather than making them sit
through the little show.

But what matters most is what awaits the user on the other side of
the interstitial. And if you have a Metcalfe or a Lapham--or the
B2B equivalent of same (which requires a strange bit of
conjuring)--don't let the Web user experience purists cow you.
Catch the chainsaw by the handle. And toss it right on back.